


In the Snow of the World

by Sylvestris



Category: Better Call Saul (TV), Breaking Bad
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Historical References, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-13 00:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5688070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sylvestris/pseuds/Sylvestris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What becomes of a father who's lost his only child? What does he become?</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Snow of the World

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heyjupiter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyjupiter/gifts).



> Title from "Praise of a Man" by Norman MacCaig.

1\. 2002

On the last night he’ll ever spend in the city where he was born, Mike comes home with a police-issue bullet in his shoulder, sutures the wound one-handed, cleans up every drop of blood in the bathroom, sets a fire in the grate downstairs and burns everything he was wearing at the bar. By the time his bag is packed, there’s nothing left of the pile of cloth but shrivelled rinds and flakes, beads of the black sap that polyester melts into, a hearth full of fine ash, fragile as snow. He sweeps it into the fender underneath the grate, sets the brush aside for whoever’s going to come and live in this hollowed-out house after he’s gone, and makes to leave.

Before he can, his hand lingers on one of the notches in the doorframe, a series of eighteen small marks that start around knee height and go up in fits and starts, an inch or two or three at a time, and end at a point just above his head, annotated _3/6/1992_ in pale, faded pencil; his boy grew up to be good and tall, six feet even. He allows himself one last moment to close his eyes and imagine Matt standing there chest-high on his twelfth birthday, to remember what the top of his head felt like under his hand.

 

The first thing Mike can remember wanting to do with his life was to drive trains, the trains that used to thunder past his childhood home every night like clockwork, rattling the pictures in their frames, throwing slanted lights onto his bedroom wall for what would have been an incalculably tiny fragment of their great and unknowable journey. Sometimes, when the trains passed in the daytime, he’d stop where he was and watch them— they came laden with glittering coal in open-topped cars, they came with grain hoppers and mysterious tankers and one boxcar after another in faded liveries painted with all sorts of logoes and numbers and symbols— and sometimes he’d wave at the men on board, always keeping his distance. He never even joined the kids who put pennies on the tracks though he was old enough to know a penny couldn’t derail a train. Children are afraid of all sorts of magical things. Ghosts. Such as, a little boy got himself killed here once and if you don’t hurry past, legend has it he’ll come out of the woods and take you away. Or, more specifically, the story that went around when he was eleven or twelve: walk across the Franklin Street bridge, turn around and look over your shoulder three times, shout some magical phrase, and the boy-ghost will reveal himself to you. They said he wore old-fashioned knickerbockers and saddle shoes and a little flat cap, and his hands were black with coal dust from wandering the railroad so long, but Mike never did see him, just a little white cross at the foot of the wall, unadorned and long since left bare.

Now, he joins a smattering of weary travellers on the first train to Washington D.C., which deposits him in the middle of the morning rush at Union Station. He buys a coffee and a newspaper and weighs the change in his hand; he could call Stacy to let her know he’s on his way, but she’s two time zones back and he doesn’t want to wake her. Maybe Hoffman and Fensky have been found by now, maybe not; maybe only their wives have woken up and realised their husbands never came back from the bar last night. Either way, they’re none of his concern any more.

The Amtrak trains are odd-looking things these days, submarinish, like stretched-out tin cans. Industrial Chicago floats past, its buildings square-shouldered, flecked with stubby leafless trees and soaring chimneys. The sun is slung low in the sky, and the ground is mottled with remnants of grimy, hard-packed snow. The freight containers, stacked like toy bricks in yards and sidings, come from all over the world now, painted in the green of the China Shipping Lines Company, the blue and grey of Maersk Line, the white of Madrigal, the fire-truck red of Hyundai. The Mississippi yawns wide and flat to his left as they rattle across a bridge, as still as ice.

Somewhere past the Missouri state line, he unwraps a foil-covered tray: chicken, rice, a small, hard dinner roll that crumbles like honeycomb when he butters it. He’s not exactly hungry, but you have to have a routine. That’s how you tell one day from another, especially in the beginning, when it seemed like there was nothing left in the world except his loss. Staying at work would have helped, if he could have set foot inside the precinct without wanting to burn it to the ground. Instead, he tendered his resignation in as many words as he could, and they all nodded and patted him on the back and murmured platitudes about looking after himself and taking time to be with his family, and it’s true he noticed Hoffman not looking him quite in the eye when he left, but he didn’t have the energy then to grab him by the scruff of his neck and strangle him to death against a wall.

He was distracted the week Matty died; the whole country was distracted. All you saw when you opened a newspaper or turned on the TV was the gaping wound where the World Trade Center used to be, and his first half-awake thought, groping to answer the phone at half past two in the morning, was that maybe another plane had come down somewhere. At first, when Matty started talking about the money instead, he felt a flicker of relief: it could be so much worse.

Two days later, someone called him from the station and told him the worst thing in the world.

As they head southwest, the country turns dry and scrubby and the sky inflates to a huge glass dome. In between the little towns served by the railroad, there’s nothing at all. Sleeping prairie. A moonscape.

 

2\. 1969

They say this new selective service lottery will be both fairer and harder to cheat than the old system, not that it makes a lot of difference from where he stands. He’s no draft dodger; he’ll go if he’s needed. He would have enlisted straight out of high school if he hadn’t been accepted into the police academy, and he thought about it again in ’67, but then Suzie had her first miscarriage, and shortly after that his supervisor told him he should think about taking the detective’s exam in a year or two, so he stayed put. 

They’ve been drawing numbers for a full hour before Mike’s birthday is called. “January fourteenth, two hundred and thirty-eight, two three eight,” the old guy on TV says, with a heavy, sweaty pause between the date and the number so he can keep people listening, and then it’s on to the next number, and Mike thinks, well, that’s that, and stares down at his beer, and thinks about the guys he knows who will undoubtedly be sent to Vietnam next year, Tom Koerner who got number thirty-one and Larry Hess who got sixty-seven and Ed Schmidt who by virtue of being exactly one day younger than Mike got called in seventeenth place, and wonders if they were watching. He can understand why they wouldn’t. It’s no different from the regular lottery; you can’t just sit and stare at the TV and will the right numbers to come up, and no amount of last-minute praying can persuade God to tip His hand your way, though he heard Suzie praying last night as he brushed his teeth. She was kneeling by their bed with its shiny Orlon counterpane that she thinks is modern and he thinks is too slippery, murmuring something long and unplanned under her breath. He turned on both faucets so as not to hear.

“Two hundred and thirty-eight,” Suzie says, and puts her head in her hands. “So…”

Mike’s not sure if she’s crying or not.

“So that’s good, right?”

“It means I probably won’t be called up,” Mike says.

“Yeah,” Suzie says, looking up at him. “That’s good, right?”

He can tell from the stress in her voice that he’s not reacting the right way.

“I’m ready to serve if they want me.”

“Of course you are, but I don’t want you to,” Suzie says, and she is crying now; she dabs at her eyes with the back of her hand.

Mike doesn’t see what there is to be happy about; all this means is someone else will be going to war instead of him.

 

Sometimes he thinks that the work he does in theory— _honor, integrity, service_ — belongs to a better world. It’s easy for people to believe in a better world when the real one is like this, so grimy, so full of bright, pretty pictures.

Ed Schmidt’s with him the night he’s called to a quiet suburb by a neighbour who heard shots fired next door, and finds an elderly man lying next to an old service weapon. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Schmidt blurts out, paling, covering his mouth. “I’m sorry, Ma’am—”

Mike takes a deep breath and thinks: this is a body, not a person any more. A body. He calls for an ambulance and writes down the number of a clean-up operation he knows, and puts a blanket around the widow’s shoulders as she sits on their neat little blue-painted porch.

“He didn’t leave a note,” she says, over and over. Like she doesn’t understand _that_ most of all.

 

There are things you do in war that are not only without precedent in civilian life, Hess says, one night a few years later, drunk; they are incompatible with civilian life. It’s the height of folly to send men where he’s been and expect them to come back and fit right into the spaces they left. He doesn’t think anyone could understand unless they’d been there.

“Mm,” Mike says, because that’s fair enough. All he knows about Vietnam is what he saw reflected in the faces of Ed Schmidt’s parents on the day they buried their son.

 

3\. 2008

“Rule number one: assume all guns are loaded.”

He opens the magazine and lets Lydia look through the barrel, though, to show her that this one isn’t. She hangs back from the table a little, guarding herself with one arm, fingers pulling nervously at the fabric of her sleeve, but her eyes are locked onto the weapon. Her brow is creased with uncertainty or trepidation. She’s looked ill at ease ever since he came in the door.

“Rule number two: don’t point it at anything or anyone you don’t want to shoot,” Mike continues. “What kind of house do you live in? Is it part of a block?”

“No. It’s detached. Two storeys including the garage.”

“Okay. If you ever find yourself handling one of these at home, best to point it down at the floor unless someone could be in the basement. Don’t point it at the wall. That’s why they call those little row houses shotgun shacks.”

Lydia swallows, pressing her lips together. When he did her background check he found out she was exactly twelve weeks younger than Matt; maybe if he’d lived he would have the same set of fine lines around his eyes by now, maybe a smattering of grey hairs.

“You’re going to want it in your bedroom, I imagine.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The safe,” Mike says, being patient with her. “You’ll want it within reach should you need it, and I wouldn’t recommend keeping a gun in your nightstand, not with a child in the house.”

“Of course not,” Lydia says, looking trapped. Her eyes are flickering left and right as if seeking an escape, and her breathing is hurried, her chest rising and falling fast beneath the fine gold chain around her neck. 

Mike looks at her a little longer, then gets up, pours a glass of water and places it in front of her. She frowns at him, but gingerly takes a sip.

“Lydia, this isn’t some Wild West every-man-for-himself type situation,” Mike says, sitting back down. “It’s a corporate enterprise. There are safeguards at every level to make sure that people like you don’t need to arm themselves except in the very worst case scenario.”

“Then why are you telling me all this?”

“Because Fring told me you had concerns, and if carrying a gun makes you feel safer, it’s worth considering. Provided you know what you’re doing with it.”

“I don’t feel safer,” Lydia mutters, eyes downcast.

“I can see that.”

“What kind of safeguards?”

“I’m not talking specifics,” Mike says. “You know how corporate security works. What I mean is, you are _part of_ something here. Everyone involved is invested; if something happens to one person, it happens to us all."

“So, what I’m doing with Gus, with— with you, you’re saying it’ll keep me safe,” Lydia says, half skeptical, half hopeful. “Like— like paying protection. Is that what you mean?”

She has no idea what she’s got herself into, but it’s too late for her to back out now.

“Do your job, keep a cool head, and you’ll stay out of trouble.”

Still, since she came all this way, he teaches her about the gun. He talks her through it, teaching her the names of the parts, how to operate the safety, how to clear the chamber. He shows her where her hands should be and how to stand to minimise the recoil. Two years later, he puts it to her head. It’s only after that night that he sees her the way she, perhaps, saw everything all along: chaotic, unpredictable and therefore menacing.

 

4\. 2009

Better Call Saul. Some services he advertises, some you just have to know about. It wouldn’t do to put “crime scene remediation” up there in gaudy block letters under “DUI” and “personal injury” and all the other things Saul promises he can make right. Mike thinks of him as someone who must have had a calling but never found it, whatever it was, and now it’s gone and he’s carved out a niche for himself and done his best to make it fit.

“It’s about a client. Well, not him. His, uh, his girlfriend passed away last night. OD’ed. He found her this morning. Inconsolable, or so I was told.”

“So you were told.”

“Yeah, a third party—” Saul sounds like he’s pinching the bridge of his nose to ward off a headache. He’s never been much of a morning person. “The kid’s partner. Associate. He called me after the kid called him— look, it’s complicated. But the last thing he wants is Pinkman getting into trouble with the cops, which given the state he’s in would seem highly likely unless we get there first.” _We_ meaning _you_ , of course.

“This Pinkman,” Mike says, “is he a dealer or just a user?”

“He’s, uh, shall we say, an enterprising young man.”

“Is he known to the police?”

“He’s got a couple of possession raps, but nothing current, and trust me, I’m taking great pains to keep it that way.”

The subtext, Mike guesses, is that this kid is making Saul a lot of money, and if so, he’ll show up on Fring’s radar soon enough, if he hasn’t already. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

When he gets there, though, of course the boy’s a wreck. Helpless with grief, he does exactly as he’s told.

Within a day of the plane crash, he knows the dead girl was the air traffic controller’s daughter. He thinks he knows it even before they show her picture on the news, just from the look on her father’s face as they usher him out into a throng of reporters. What becomes of a father who’s lost his only child? What does he become?

 

5\. 2010

He thinks Gus might be dead already, but he doesn’t move to check; even if he could reach back there and feel for a pulse, he can’t climb over and start CPR if there isn’t one. It’s all out of his hands now. 

“Where are we going?” Jesse asks, like he isn’t the one currently threading some capo’s flashy sports car through a series of potholed switchbacks at eighty miles per hour. “What’s the plan?”

“There’s a medical team ten minutes away,” Mike says, keeping his hand on the wound in his side as he speaks. It’s high up. When he coughs, he tastes blood. There’s a heavy, clawing pain radiating from the place where he was shot, like how he always imagined a heart attack would feel. The fact that he’s not dead already tells him he probably won’t die within the next few minutes, but beyond that? Today might be the day. He’s not a fool. Number two hundred and thirty-eight, you’re up.

“Yeah, but _where_?”

“I’ll tell you,” Mike says. He has to form each word carefully; it takes effort to coax them out. “Just stay calm and keep going.”

Jesse strains to see Gus in the rear-view mirror, his eyes wide and sharp.

“Is he breathing?”

 

“There’s a chance I will stop breathing,” Gus had said a couple of weeks prior, looking him calmly in the eye. His hands on the table were perfectly still. “If Dr. Goodman is unable to resuscitate me within a few minutes, I may be permanently incapacitated or killed. In either case, I ask that you carry out my wishes regarding Hector Salamanca. I want him to be put to death. I want him to know that I was his killer.”

It sounded like a suicide mission to him, but Gus didn’t hire him for his counsel, so he just nodded. Killing Hoffman and Fensky didn’t mend the wound, it just deepened it; he took two lives for Matty, and Matty’s still gone. To take revenge was to find that nothing on this earth, no prayer, no pledge, no ritual, no sacrifice, however profound, could bring back the child he lost, not even selling his soul.

 

He used to think sometimes that he and Matty were born to live in different worlds. Mike belonged in the here and now and Matty belonged in some other place, some world where all men are men of their word and the streets have a storybook glow, the kind of place people think they remember when they talk about how things used to be. No, Mike himself was born in America’s great post-war hurrah and Matt was born into a world of oil shocks and landmines and kickbacks, and he still grew up good and true. Mike used to think sometimes that if there was a reason he was brought into this world it was not just to have children but to have _this_ son, this boy, and raise him to a man. That perhaps that was why God tipped His hand and spared him from the war.

After Matt died, the thought dissolved. He sat in church with Suzie frozen by his side and felt, instead of any kind of solace, as if he were confronting a great, beautiful lie: no loving God would let a father feel the weight of his child’s casket on his shoulder.

“I see it,” Jesse’s shouting. “Mike! It’s right there, I see it!”

Mike sees it too, the barn where they were going to set up the hospital, tucked in beside a dip in the road, and lets his eyes close again. The bullet definitely nicked his lung; breathing feels like inhaling iron filings. “That’s it,” he tries to say, but Jesse’s leaning on the horn so hard he’d have to yell to make himself heard. He sinks back into half-consciousness; shock is taking care of the pain. 

“Mike!” Jesse shouts, urgent, furious. “I need you!”

“No, you don’t,” Mike mumbles, and he means it. “You’ve got this.”


End file.
